A recent survey by eCommera found that 42.6% of UK consumers buy something online at least once a week. This figure will only get higher as tablets, smartphones and internet enabled TV's spread in popularity.

Businesses must react and adapt to these changes in purchasing patterns if they wish to remain competitive. Many businesses are fully up to speed with the internet now, and for those of us who are completely involved in the sector and who conduct a large part of our social lives on the web, we can sometimes fail to appreciate that there are still companies and individuals who cannot understand the jargon we in the industry have created.

SEO

Search engine optimisation is a method of marketing your site so that the search engines can easily find it. There are two main methods organic (natural and unpaid) search results and paid for searches (see PPC below). SEO needs to be integrated into the development of your website, basically it makes your site more visible to the search engines. Keywords are agreed (see below) and incorporated into your site both in the public areas and hidden behind the site. These are then continuously worked on to market your site once it has gone live.

PPC

Pay per click is an easier but far more expensive form of SEO, where you pay for responses from social networks and search engines, and should be used sparingly to boost traffic to your site.

Keywords

Keywords are words and short phrases chosen by you and your SEO specialist, after research, that you will put within the open text on your web pages and include in the page tags that the search engines look for. Keep the numbers down on these words as the search engines will not read them if they have too many characters. It is also important that the choice of words is well researched, you may have an idea of how people will search for you but if those words are also being used 5 million times a month to search other sites then they are not worth using because of the competition.

SMM

Social media marketing, this may be viewed as irrelevant but it is growing increasingly important. It is a method of engaging with your customers and creating two way traffic, plus the major search engines are now tracking social media activity, so it is essential that this is used as part of your overall web marketing plan. Using mainly Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook

This is really a massive networking opportunity, if you can get users "liking" your brand, then they will share that with all their friends. By creating fans you will gain advocates for your business at a relatively low cost.

Twitter

Being on Twitter allows you to listen as well as participate in public conversations about your business or your industry sector. Twitter has a very high referral rate to website and blog links.

Please give us a call at Verve, web design Shrewsbury